Authoring reports within a global enterprise context presents some interesting challenges. Reports are authored by a relatively small number of people for a large and varied audience. Authors are specialists in their problem domain, but not necessarily in the design of large databases (sometimes known as data warehouses) and their use. Nonetheless, in producing the reports, the authors must address factors such as:                catering to readers who speak different languages and who may be in different locales (implying differing localized expectations of how data are displayed),        reporting against different database instances, which have different data coverage, although they have the compatible structure,        being able to create and test reports and their underlying metadata models in a development context, and        deploying reports to a production environment.        
Although currently available reporting products address these factors they have been found inadequate. In most cases, different versions of both models and reports must be created and deployed to handle these factors. For instance a large number of versions of reports in different languages is typically required, with manual (visual) checking to ensure that the results are similar across different domains.
What is needed is the ability to produce multiple versions of reports to ensure their consistency across language and locale, or to permit user selectable variations in the grouping of data, avoiding manual mechanisms where possible. The users (report authors) should not be aware of the factors at issue in the system design. Ideally the system would produce the numerous required reports with little or no extra effort, despite the complexity and magnitude of the underlying database.